FEATURED AUTHOR

João Florêncio

Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
University of Exeter

I am a cultural theorist of the body working on visual representations of sex, health, disease and Nature vis-à-vis historical conceptualisations of the dyad immunity/community.

Subjects: Art & Visual Culture, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Gender & Sexuality, Media and Cultural Studies

Biography

I am a cultural theorist of the body working on representations of sex, health, disease and Nature vis-à-vis historical conceptualisations of the dyad immunity/community.

My interdisciplinary research explores the ways in which individual and collective bodies have been contested terrains in modern and contemporary culture. I draw from modern and contemporary visual culture, performance studies, queer studies, the posthumanities, and the medical humanities to probe the permeability of bodies (human and non-human, in both their material and ideological dimensions) to one another, approaching them as porous media interfaces.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Queer Visual Cultures, LGBTQ Studies, Porn Studies, Masculinities Studies, Posthumanities, Medical Humanities

Websites

Books

Featured Title

Articles

Antiretroviral Time: Gay Sex, Pornography and Temporality ‘Post-Crisis’

Published: Nov 03, 2020 by Somatechnics
Authors: João Florêncio
Subjects: Gender & Sexuality, Media and Cultural Studies, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Art & Visual Culture

In this essay, I draw from field work carried out in Berlin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and analysis of gay pornography, to map the new temporalities of sex and subjectivity that have been catalysed by the introduction of antiretroviral drugs, speculating on their limits and queer political potential, situated as they are at the intersection of neoliberal regimes of biomedical self-administration and sex understood as both an aesthetics and poetics of existence.

The Theatre of Posthuman Immunity

Published: Mar 22, 2019 by The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics
Authors: João Florêncio

Departing from Antonin Artaud’s essay ‘The Theater and the Plague’, this article weaves together theatre scholarship and immunology to explore the ways in which the autonomous human subject idealised by Western modernity failed to appear.

Breeding futures: masculinity and the ethics of CUMmunion in Treasure Island Media’s Viral Loads

Published: May 31, 2018 by Porn Studies
Authors: João Florêncio
Subjects: Media and Cultural Studies, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Art & Visual Culture

In a recent interview, pornographer Paul Morris claimed his studio, Treasure Island Media, is a ‘laboratory exploring the vital sexual symbiosis of human and viral DNA’. Departing from that claim, I examine his porn text Viral Loads to explore its implications for thinking future-orientated masculinities and community formations.

Evoking the Strange Within: Performativity, Metaphor and Translocal Knowledge in Derek Jarman’s Blue

Published: Jan 01, 2016 by Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer
Authors: João Florêncio
Subjects: Film and Video, Art & Visual Culture

This article explores the performative role of metaphor in evoking the experience of HIV and AIDS in Derek Jarman's 1993 film Blue.

Videos

OINK! (documentary teaser)

Published: Sep 22, 2020

OINK! is a research documentary produced by Dr João Florêncio (University of Exeter, UK) Featuring interviews recorded in Los Angeles and Berlin in 2019/20, the experimental documentary film offers a portrait of gay men who—in different ways—relate to the gay “pig” sexual imaginary. World Premiere: Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, London, November 2020.

Lecture: "Take It Like a Man, Pig"

Published: Apr 22, 2018

Lecture at the Open ISSH-S Lectures Series (Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje)

Lecture: "You're Toxic, I'm Falling Under"

Published: Apr 13, 2019

Lecture delivered at "Queer-feminist Ecocriticism in Live Art and Visual Cultures" (Queen Mary, University of London)

Book Launch Roundtable - Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures

Published: Sep 04, 2020

João Florêncio in conversation with John Mercer, Ricky Varghese, Rob Eagle, Liz Rosenfeld, Jamie Hakim, and Benjamin Weil, during the launch of "Bareback Porn Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig" at the Viral Masculinities conference hosted by the University of Exeter with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.